Humour and Translation, an interdiscipline

Monsignor to new priest, “When David was hit by a rock and knocked off his 
donkey, don’t say he was stoned off his ass.” 
Example 3 
In a Norwegian cocktail lounge: “Ladies are requested not to have children in the 
bar.”
• 
Improvisation 
Humor may be carefully contrived and rehearsed, or may be more spontaneous. 
Both kinds of humor can often be very difficult to translate, for different reasons. 

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Elaborate humor, or humor that is part of an elaborate rhetorical style, is difficult 
when one wishes to translate the nuances and innuendo as well as the more 
obvious aspects of the text. Spur-of-the moment punning and joking is a typical 
nightmare for interpreters because they have no means of backtracking or 
foreseeing where the pun is going to fall unless warned some time before the 
speaker’s performance, by getting a copy of the speech, for example.
• 
Signals (of the intention to joke) 
Translators, like other text users, may miss certain jokes, either because they 
“don’t get it” or because they fail to identify the presence of a joke that has not 
been overtly signalled (for joke signals, see Nash 1985). Because of the 
difficulties involved in translating humor, the translator may feel the need to turn 
covert forms of humor into more overt manifestations, especially if the translation 
is less effective than the original, in this case the translator conveys that there has 
been attempt at being funny, while acknowledging failure to render the actual 
funniness (the problem is that the public usually have no way of knowing whether 
such a failure is the translator’s or the source text’s). In any case, this kind of 
practice is quite common in translation on the whole, so much so that it has given 
rise to the hypothesis that translations have a universal tendency to be more 
explicit than their source texts. The down side of this practice occurs when humor 
is based, or relies on subtlety, tongue-in-cheek, irony, allusion and other such 
covert devices, but the translator resorts to broad brush, bluntness and denotative 
meaning to spell everything out to the text user in no uncertain terms, thus 
shredding the very fabric of this kind of humor. Sometimes, however, puns might 
be designed to be particularly difficult to spot, when the translator (and/or author) 
wishes to get around the censor, for instance. 
• 
Private (or in-group) jokes 
A typical hindrance to humor appreciation is for the text user to be “left out” of a 
private joke, or humor that relies heavily on people belonging to certain groups. 

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The nature and size of such groups covers a whole range of possibilities. Even 
people of the same country, village, or school may be “left out”, so foreigners are 
much more likely candidates, and the principle still works when the group is a 
whole nationality. In the latter case, “private national-group” would overlap with 
the category of “restricted by necessary knowledge and appreciation of culturally 
bound items”. Smaller groups may be defined by small geographical regions, 
certain social classes or professions, interest groups, political parties, minority 
groups, and so on. Often such groups are characterised by their sociolect or 
dialect, or particular language awareness. 
• 
Wordplay v. Narrative (linguistic v. textual) 
Humor may be produced by wordplay, as in puns, one liners, limericks, witticims, 
and so on, or by funny situations that gradually unfold or suddenly become 
apparent in the narrative or plot. The latter case is not necessarily difficult to 
translate, although translators who have their noses too close to the page may not 
be able to see the forest (narrative twists and turns) through all the trees (words 
and sentences). It is also a good reminder that how we translate a single sentence 
or even word does not depend entirely on the word or sentence itself, or even its 
immediate surroundings, but may depend on passages that are far removed form 
the part of the text we happen to be translating at any given moment. 
Compensation both of kind and place must be taken into account when exploring 
possible solutions. Compensation of kind involves achieving the same effect by 
different means, thus compensating for not using the one appearing in the source 
text. Compensation of place refers to the practice of making a certain source-text 
item or feature appear in a different place in the translation in order to avoid loss 
of meaning, effect, function or intention. 
• 
Target 
Usually the most interesting jokes and other instances of humor involve some sort 
of victim, or target. Victimless humor tends to be either childlike humor, such as 

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toilet humor, or intellectual games, such as riddles or linguistic awareness 
(examples 4 and 5). Victims may be people, individuals or groups, institutions, 
ideas, common practices or beliefs, etc. Needless to say all of them may be 
perceived differently in different communities and this affects the strategies and 
the success of translating victim-related humor. Victimless humor is not usually 
any easier to translate because it tends to be metalinguistic, and in-group related. 
Finally, all of the mechanisms used to produce victimless humor may also be used 
when there is an identifiable victim, so the translator (and any other text user for 
that matter) should not be misled by the initial appearance of an instance of 
humor. 
Example 4 
Whose cruel idea was it for the word “lisp” to have an “s” in it? 
Whether we consider example 4 to be victimless or otherwise may actually 
depend on the routine, or text, it is a part of, and how it is performed or presented. 
• 
Meaning 
We have already stressed the importance of meaning in mainstream translation. 
Translating humor is complicated by the fact that it often relies on double 
meaning, ambiguity, metaphorical meanings, and sometimes not on meaning—in 
the traditional sense of the word meaning—but rather on absurdity, surrealism, or 
abstract or symbolic meaning. Again none of this is exclusive to humor (which 
makes it interesting to translation studies in other areas such as poetry and 
advertising jingles). 
• 
Optionality and familiarity (regarding theme, genre, etc.) 
Certain instances of humor may be expected so strongly as to be virtually 
compulsory. An example of this could be public speeches for special occasions. In 
English-speaking countries such occasions are much more numerous and the need 

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to show a sense of humor much more pressing than in other countries. On other 
occasions (e.g. a prosecutor seeking the death penalty for the defendant) humor 
may be rare, or at least a certain brand of it. One of the translator’s jobs will be to 
assess to what degree the presence of humor responds to demands of the genre, or 
social occasion, and likewise, what the consequences will be for including or 
excluding humor from the translation, regardless/because of its presence/absence 
in the source text. 
• 
Taboo (embarrassment, offence, etc.) 
Taboo is an instance of a culture-bound factor in the specific nature of each taboo, 
although the notion and presence of taboo is universal. Taboo can either be an 
external factor or a component of humor. In the first case, I am referring, for 
instance, to jokes about aspects of society that are associated to taboo (typically, 
bodily functions, sex, religion, politics), or that deal with these subjects in a light-
hearted manner. In the second case, I am referring to occasions when humor itself 
is taboo, or certain brand of it. Obviously, the two could appear simultaneously. 
The fact that these parameters vary from one community to another forces the 
translator to assess the risk involved in rendering certain typs of humor with little 
or no change. An example of this can be seen in the variety of laws and 
regulations from one country to another that deal with humor on television; what 
words can be used, which institutions and groups can be targeted, and so on. 

Metalinguistic humor 
By metalinguistic humor we mean that its object is language, and its objective 
language awareness. Obviously, translation is nearly always about changing from 
one language into another and that tends to pose serious difficulties for finding a 
way to translate these jokes. One could almost say that translation itself is a word 
game, and rendering metalinguistic humor in another language is a particularly 
challenging riddle. Wordplay forms include pun, acrostic, rhyme, anagram, 
witticism, etc. It is important not to forget the function of wordplay in case it is 

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more important than form. Wordplay functions include: phatic, image-enhancing;